goldbrick wrote:I got $5000 off from CO when I bought my 2017 Leaf. I doubt any of that would apply to a lease. A quick google search shows this same rebate ($5k) is extended to 2021 in CO. I never saw the money as it went straight from CO to the dealer and they just took it off the purchase price.

Ah. I see that the bill has changed on EV tax credits in Colorado. So it looks like yes, on a new EV one could get $5,000. I got about $4,000 on a used EV, but the bill no longer covers used EV's.

2013 SL 50,000 miles. 12 bars until 44,300 miles on June 2, 2017. 11 bars current. The Nissan Leaf is the fourth best long distance car for highway driving. >>Best Long Distance Cars<<

This would be ideal for a battery trailer. You could leave the battery trailer at a charging station, or put roughly 6kW (20' x 20') of fold out solar panels on it and leave it in some parking lot or something, and then come back to a fully charged battery trailer. You wouldn't need the two batteries to have the same voltage like has been done with some of these other experiments, hence they could be charged separately.

2013 SL 50,000 miles. 12 bars until 44,300 miles on June 2, 2017. 11 bars current. The Nissan Leaf is the fourth best long distance car for highway driving. >>Best Long Distance Cars<<

This would be ideal for a battery trailer. You could leave the battery trailer at a charging station, or put roughly 6kW (20' x 20') of fold out solar panels on it and leave it in some parking lot or something, and then come back to a fully charged battery trailer. You wouldn't need the two batteries to have the same voltage like has been done with some of these other experiments, hence they could be charged separately.

I saw that a while back, it seemed pretty sparse on details. There's strangely an update as of 4 days ago, saying they can add 6 and 12 kWH also. I shot them an email asking for more details. It might be worth it to do one of the smaller range extensions just to see how they do it and see how scalable it is...

This would be ideal for a battery trailer. You could leave the battery trailer at a charging station, or put roughly 6kW (20' x 20') of fold out solar panels on it and leave it in some parking lot or something, and then come back to a fully charged battery trailer. You wouldn't need the two batteries to have the same voltage like has been done with some of these other experiments, hence they could be charged separately.

I'm quite skeptical of the smaller range extending options but for a full pack swap it seems pretty simple to me, just swap out the full BMS/contactor connector which he could have done manually when he put the camera down, and the 2 packs could be left in parallel since only one set of contactors would be active at any time.

jkenny23 wrote:I'm quite skeptical of the smaller range extending options but for a full pack swap it seems pretty simple to me, just swap out the full BMS/contactor connector which he could have done manually when he put the camera down, and the 2 packs could be left in parallel since only one set of contactors would be active at any time.

I think you could leave both batteries in parallel and just use their contactors for changing between batteries. You could also possibly close both batteries' contactors and run both at the same time, provided both had the exact same level of charge and therefore voltage.

But it looks like the problem resistor is in the inverter, not the battery itself. If you keep the contactors open in one traction battery there shouldn't be anything in there that could get fried that I know of. But there is a risk that there could be. It would be nice to find a diagram of how the traction batteries are wired just to make sure. Switching low voltage signals between batteries would be cheap and easy. But it would be nice to keep both connected to the main bus without any costly high power switching device. At most, a second set of contactors would be used to isolate the bus going to the second battery, especially if that battery were on a trailer.